During manufacturing, machine parts often must be cleaned to remove metal chips, lubricating oils and contaminants before being installed in an assembly or being delivered. In addition, used parts often must be cleaned during overhaul or maintenance operations. As a result, a wide variety of methods and devices have been developed to cleanse parts. Industrial parts washers may be developed for general use or for specific applications. Industrial parts washers are utilized in a wide variety of industries. For example, extensive use is found in the automotive industry, the aerospace industry, the agricultural equipment industry, the heavy equipment industry, and the computer industry. Furthermore, industrial parts washers have been developed to remove a wide variety of contaminants, including, for example, carbon residue, grease, grinding compounds, oils, lubricants, metal burrs, metal working fluids, mold release, particulates, rust, soil, and wax.
Depending on the application, industrial parts washers have been designed using an assortment of cleaning methods. For example, immersion cleaning equipment typically is outfitted with baskets or screened trays to handle parts that cannot tolerate rotation or tumbling. Spray washers, or pressure parts washers, clean parts by directing a pressurized spray of hot water or cleaning solution at a component. Immersion parts washers clean components by submerging them in an agitated cleaning solution contained in a wash tank. Solvent washers use chemical solvents to clean or degrease, typically immersing parts in a liquid solvent or utilizing spray nozzles to disperse the solvent for additional cleaning. Ultra-sonic cleaning systems use vibration developed by uniformly dispersing ultrasonic cavitation into a fluid surrounding the parts or components. Forced-flow systems channel pressurized fluid through a cavity in the parts, such as tubing.
Industrial washers also come in a wide range of sizes, from small table-top washing machines or small scrub tank sinks to large front-loading turntable or conveyor cleaning systems. These systems may be designed for general cleaning or for highly specialized applications, such as critical cleaning systems of electronics components or wafers, bottle or container cleaners, or sterilizing and disinfecting cleaners for pharmaceutical and food applications. Included among these specialized applications of specific industrial parts washers are tube cleaning systems.
Tube cleaning systems apply various methods to deliver a cleaning solution to each tube. For example, some tube cleaning systems utilize flexible hose connections, inserting an individual hose into each tube to ensure delivery of cleaning solution to each tube. However, this requires significant labor, because each tube must be individually fitted to a hose connector. Furthermore, the tube sizes that can be cleaned are limited by the size of the hose connectors. In addition, some tube cleaning systems use solvents that require special handling and disposal. Other tube cleaning systems require excessively high fluid flow rates to clean large tubes. Moreover, many tube cleaning systems are designed for large batch processes, and cannot be adapted for use in an efficient cellular manufacturing scheme.
Despite the number and variety of industrial cleaning systems available, specific applications continue to require the development of new industrial parts washers. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a method and apparatus that uses an aqueous cleaning solution to clean tubing of a range of diameters, capable of accommodating small diameter and large diameter tubes simultaneously without requiring that the individual tubes be held in place by individual fixtures. It is also desirable that the method and apparatus be capable of cleaning large diameter tubing without requiring excessive fluid flow rates. Furthermore, it is desirable that the cleaning system be portable and sized for use in an efficient cellular manufacturing scheme.